Today, radio broadcast programming provides an important marketing tool for exposing the general public to commercially available musical recordings. To this end, each regional market typically contains a number of different radio stations, each of which provides programming for a select demographic segment of market. For example, each major regional market typically includes at least one radio station that broadcasts musical selections from Billboard Magazine's Top 40 Hits. Similarly, each regional market typically includes a classical music station that broadcasts musical selections from commercially available recordings of classical music.
Recording studios encourage and promote the broadcasting of musical selections from their studios by providing the radio stations with incentives, including free copies of recent recordings, sponsorships of contests, and local concerts, and other similar marketing techniques. Recording studios deem these promotions to be worthwhile in that marketing studies evidence that consumers purchase musical selections that are familiar to them. Accordingly, recording studios deem that the free distribution of their musical selections through radio broadcast programming facilitates the sales of their products by making the general population familiar with these products.
Although radio broadcasting offers an excellent technique for broadcasting high-quality musical selections, these radio stations are generally mass marketing tools and, therefore, provide programming tailored to universal tastes. However, the universal tastes of the general population generally dictate that radio broadcast programming is to include a varied selection of musical artists. Accordingly, recording studios rarely can convince radio stations to feature one of their artists by providing a sequence of selections from that particular artist. Moreover, radio stations typically emphasize only one or two selections from any one CD, and, therefore, offer a recording studio no outlet for exposing the public to less popular work of a particular artist.
Furthermore, recording studios that produce musical selections which stray from conventional tastes often find that regional markets lack any radio stations suited for carrying their musical selections and, therefore, lack a ready method for exposing the general public to their products.
Additionally, even if a radio station does offer a program suited to less universal tastes, typically that radio program is slotted for a less popular time slot than more universally accepted recordings. Consequently, even though the recording studio is provided with some exposure for its less popular works, the exposure is offered at a time slot that is less popular and, therefore, monitored by a smaller audience.
In response to this failure of existing radio stations to provide a distribution outlet for such recording studios, systems have been developed for distributing musical selections via computer networks, such as the Internet. Although these systems allow each recording studio to deliver inexpensively select copies of their products, the actual distribution is a cumbersome and slow process that requires each user to log onto a particular network site and maintain a connection during the download of the data. This can take as much as forty-five minutes for a high-fidelity audio download. Consequently, the general public disfavors these systems and they are infrequently used.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide systems and methods that allow editing of a radio broadcast signal to generate a proprietary radio program.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide alternative methods for distributing audio information.
It is yet another object of the present invention to provide systems and methods for time shifting portions of a radio broadcast programming signal.
Other objects of the invention will be apparent to one of ordinary skill in the art, and others will be made apparent upon review of the following description and from review of the illustrated embodiments in conjunction therewith.